


you don't remember, but I do

by macabre



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: AU, F/F, Femslash, Post-Skyfall, Severine survives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 05:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/770743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one thinks much of the woman Silva shot in the head until Eve notices her on her commute home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you don't remember, but I do

There’s a woman on the tube - a woman with dark hair. Darker eyes. She bothers Eve for some reason, something other than the fact that she seems to frequent the same trains as her despite her lack of an usual schedule. She steps on different cars, different times of day - often, this woman is there, peacoat slipped up to her chin and waves of hair covering most of her face. A woman playing coy? But with whom? She’s always alone, avoids eye contact with anyone else. Eve gets on and off, and the woman rides on. 

It’s been a little over a year since Bond’s M died, and hers took reign. She enjoys working with him, rarely misses the field. It doesn’t stop the uncomfortable twinge when she sees Bond. They flirt, he leaves, she tries to think nothing of him.

It’s a moment of relapse when she finally recognizes the woman on the tube - one moment she’s thinking of a straight razor and a grizzled jaw, then she recalls the woman in the black dress, beautiful. Deadly.

As soon as she remembers, she looks up, sure it’s the same woman. She’s been following Eve all this time. How stupid was she? By now, she knows where Eve gets off and on. She could guess times, too. It’s difficult but not to draw patterns to patternless. 

But the woman isn’t there. Not today. It’s strange, not seeing her. 

“Do you remember the woman in Macau?” Eve asks Bond when she sees him next. She’s spotted the woman a couple more times already, but never confronted her. Not yet.

Bond grunts. Why would he remember her?

“Exotic thing. Worked with Silva.” 

Got shot in the head, she thinks.

“Severine,” Bond says musically, as if he remembers her perfectly. Maybe he does. Maybe no one gives him enough credit in his conquests.

“Yes, that’s the one.” He’s already given her the information she wanted, but she continues. “She died that day.”

“Didn’t.” He pockets a round. “Bullet through the head and I didn’t think to check her. Medical got on scene and told me she was alive. Several weeks later I heard they pulled the bullet out. She lived.”

“Bond, she’s here. In London.”

While he raises an eyebrow, he doesn’t have a proper response outside a shrug. “Where should she be?”

“Far from here.”

“She’s no threat.”

“How do you know?”

 

 

They ride the train for two hours, going one way then back, then hopping another train. Finally, they walk through the cars and she’s there. Silently staring out the window, not reading. Not meeting anyone’s eye. Just sitting with her hands folded in her lap, back straight. 

Bond sits directly across from her. Cautiously, Eve follows him, watching as she slides her eyes away so she doesn’t have to look at them. 

“Pleasant evening,” Bond addresses Severine. She doesn’t respond. “I do enjoy a woman in thigh-highs.”

“Bond,” Eve hisses, warning him, but Severine does nothing but standing and silently move to the other end of the car, never acknowledging either of them, let alone her past bedmate.

“She doesn’t remember me,” he says, melancholy creeping in, or just genuine sadness for the woman. “They told me she most likely wouldn’t recover most memory. That’s undoubtedly why she’s allowed to stay in the country. At the time, I was too busy mourning to even follow up on her.”

Eve watches the way Severine crosses one long leg over the other, the picture of beauty and confidence, but she also sees how short her nails are when she used to keep them longer than talons.

“What now? Did they set her up someplace? Stipend and all?” 

“No idea.” 

The train stops. Severine gets off. She’s never gotten off before Eve. 

“Did anyone bother to follow up on her?” Eve huffs; not only could she attract some of Silva’s men into the country looking for her, or worse, his enemies, but legally if she wasn’t supposed to be here, then M16 surely wiped all traces. She’s a ghost, with nothing and no one.

“I think she’s used to slipping through the cracks.”

 

 

Eve comes back from Berlin exhausted and pining for a drink that she won’t let herself have. She goes straight to the office, stays there for another twenty-four hour period, then finally climbs onto the tube home. 

She doesn’t even realize she’s sleeping until she feels a gentle hand on her arm. Instinct tells her to break it. 

“I think this is your stop,” Severine says quietly, swaying as the train pulls to a stop and she can’t move, can’t pull away, not when her hand is caught in Eve’s because she won’t let go. She’s about to tumble to the floor when Eve stands abruptly, one hand on the rail to steady the both of them. 

“Sorry,” she says, dropping her hand once they’ve stopped. She might have bruises there in a few hours. “I mean, thanks.”

She’s so tired she tries to stand only to realize she’s already standing. Without saying anything else or feeling strange about speaking to this woman who she knows but not, Eve stumbles off the train and through the platform. She’s on the streets before she realizes she’s been followed. 

“I’m sorry,” Severine says, all thick accent and smoker lungs. “You don’t seem well tonight. I thought I would make sure you got home safely.”

Eve laughs, and not kindly. Severine flinches, taking back her delicate hand once more from where she’s barely touched Eve’s shoulder. It’s not a delicate hand, Eve corrects herself - it’s decaying. 

“Want to get something to eat with me?” Eve asks. It’s almost three in the morning, and the only thing around them still open is a supermarket with a bar to sit and eat at in the window.

“You’re about to fall over.” A wane response.   
“I need to eat.” She crosses the street to the market. She’s not sure if she’s surprised or not that Severine follows her, nursing a cup of black coffee while Eve eats a cold sandwich. When she follows her home to bed, she’s really not surprised.

 

 

“My name is Severine,” she says in the morning. It’s too goddamned sunny for London, so Eve has to squint at her even if her hair blocks out half the light already.

“Eve.”

Technically, Eve has the day off, or a few days off, if she needs, before she has to report back. It makes her skin crawl to stay in bed. 

She gives her guest a change of clothes as best will fit her - a dress that mostly fits except it’s shorter on her long legs. Severine snags a belt off her and cinches in the waist too; she looks like a walk-ready model. Eve smiles.

“Unfair. You look better in my clothes than I do.” 

“I doubt it very much.”

They don’t mean to, but they spend the day together drinking tea then coffee, then more tea. Severine tells her she was in a trauma that saved her life; she used to be a sex worker in a land very far away, and now she lives in London where she fosters neglected animals and practices yoga every morning. 

She shows Eve some of her moves.

 

 

Now when Eve finds Severine riding the same train, they often times go home together. Severine’s place is tiny, dark, and a little damp. Right now she has two cats and a tiny lap dog staying with her, although she says they rarely stay with her long. 

Eve can tell she’s lonely. 

They play strip chess and spend the rest of the night naked although they hardly touch each other. Severine is somehow too shy to make the first move anymore, and Eve feels as comfortable in relationships as she does at her family estate up north.

They don’t talk about Severine’s past, so in return she doesn’t ask Eve anything she doesn’t want to answer. Still, Eve wonders. Is this all real? Can she really forget such selective memories? She doesn’t remember Silva at all, a man she was with for many years. He was the largest part of her life, and one gunshot and he’s gone.

It’s for the best.

 

 

Word gets out around the office that Eve’s seeing someone. Their people naturally like to keep things private, so no one outright asks her out of respect, but some of the agents break eye-contact sooner than they would have, or some no longer invite her to tea. She isn’t sure how anyone found out, or maybe they didn’t, but it’s Bond who gives her a coy smile whenever they’re together.

“Shut your mouth.”

“Didn’t say anything,” he says, warmly. Her heart swells in great affection for the man. He not only doesn’t judge her in any way, but he sounds so genuinely pleased for her.

“Everyone’s convinced I’m having some sort of royal affair and that I’m putting on a white dress soon.”

He just smiles, laughing. She realizes she’s never heard him laugh before.

In more somber times, she’ll ask him: “Isn’t it strange? I’m having a relationship with a woman you’ve slept with, a woman who slept with one of the greatest terrorists of this decade.”

“She doesn’t remember,” he says. Today he is waiting for some x-rays to show him how bad his legs are after being run-over by a car in the field. 

“I wish I could make myself believe it.”

Silence, then: “Does she have a scar from it?”

“Yes. Her hair won’t grow over the spot.” Severine absolutely hates it; she rubs at it nervously whenever she’s feeling unsure of herself.

“Don’t you find it hard to forget when there’s a scar?” He asks. “I don’t think she remembers a thing. I think she remembers even less than what she says.”

Bond never meets Severine again; he says he has no interest until Eve puts on a white gown.

 

 

They both have bad days; for Eve, it means watching a colleague die then coming home and drinking until she physically can’t stand any longer. She doesn’t need her legs, she tells herself. She’s not a field agent anymore. She just sits behind her desk and does as she’s told.

For Severine, bad days mean vertigo or misplacing her wallet, keys. This happens frequently enough that Eve keeps all her important documentation for her. Forgetting to feed the animals. Forgetting to feed herself. Sometimes Eve finds her standing on her tiptoes on the edge of the train platform, oncoming train creeping to a halt in front of her but she’s not moving. 

It sobers Eve up. She doesn’t keep any kind of alcohol after awhile. It’s not fair to willingly immobilize herself when Severine doesn’t have a choice. 

Never once does Severine slip, never once does an image of blonde hair plague her, nor does she seem to remember men’s touch at all, but it doesn’t stop her from shying away from most people, men particularly. 

She has no one but Eve. Eve doesn’t have anyone but Severine and work. 

 

 

Eve still doesn’t acknowledge her relationship with Severine to anyone but Bond. It’s part complication - is it a wise idea to be involved with someone from a mission she was at least partly involved in? they will ask - but it’s also part fear over the gossip that will spread when they hear it’s a woman. 

In public, they hold hands or creep them into each other’s back pockets. They sit outside at cafes in the nicer weather and eat lunch, or they run laughing through the rain to make it to a show in the square. Anyone could see them. Eve doesn’t care. It’s when she’s in her pressed dresses by M’s side that she finds herself liplocked about it.

It eats her inside. It’s been almost a year and Severine wants to move in but Eve’s never considered it would get this far. What does she tell her? She knows she works for the government, but certainly not to what extent. 

They fight more; it almost pleases Eve, until she comes to work and cries in the office when M leaves. One day, he catches her at it, sits patiently on the corner of her desk and offers her a handkerchief. 

“Did your lady leave you, Moneypenny?” he asks quietly. She never told him, but she’s not surprised he knows. How would he be fit to run MI6 if he couldn’t dig up the dirt on his secretary? 

“No, quite the opposite,” she sounds miserable. “I just don’t know what to tell her anymore. We’re past the stage of evasion, and I can’t lie to her. I care too much.”

He’s quiet for awhile. He sighs. “When I met my wife, it was in Morocco. She was married, I was in the middle of an oil war. I killed two men the day we met. We fell in love that day, hardly spoke a word to each other, but every year we came back to each other. We never planned it, never spoke to each other outside of Morocco. One year she came back alone, no ring. She told me she expected me to replace it and I told her what I did for a living.”

“But she married you.” She’s seen the photo he keeps in his office; only one, she died a few years ago of cancer.

“Yes. She came with me to London and we bought a ring the next day.”

“I’m sorry, Sir, for your loss.” They had never spoken of her before. No one spoke of her to M at all. 

“I don’t need your apologies.” He stands. “I need you to be happy. You can’t function like this for long.”

In the future, M is the only person she ever speaks to of Severine. The next Christmas, they run into him on the street outside of the restaurant where they’ve gorged themselves on rich meats and creams. They all chat pleasantly about the holiday and the blasted cold, but he declines a drink with them, wishes them a happy holiday, then leaves.

“Congratulations, Moneypenny,” he says when he sees her the next day. “She’s lovely.”

 

 

It’s been five years since Skyfall. Bond doesn’t work the kind of jobs he used to, and Eve doesn’t venture out into the field at all. Severine is happy about this; she knows the gist of Eve’s job, and knows the gist of their history before their relationship. She still doesn’t remember Silva or much of Macau. She still brings home more strays than they can manage.

“Who’s this?” Eve pets a shaggy blanket of fur. Just a peek of a panting tongue underneath all it.

“Gilbert,” Severine replies from the kitchen, sounding flustered. She’s trying to quit smoking for not the first time.

“Bit big for our bed, don’t you think?” 

Gilbert is the size of a small horse. 

“He’s only staying the week, darling.” That’s what she always says; usually, they stay at least a month. 

Sighing, Eve drops to the couch, a cat crawling into her lap and Gilbert jumping to her feet. She can’t move. She never considered herself an animal person, just a stray person.

“How was work?” Severine asks. She’s cooking in her underwear because she won’t ruin any of her fine clothing, nor does she like aprons. 

“Boring.” Eve and Gilbert have a staring contest in which Eve isn’t entirely sure he can see her through all his fur. 

“Good,” she says, disappearing to clink dishes together. They eat on the couch, Severine awkwardly teetering on top of the dog.

“Do you remember the first time we ate together?” Eve asks. She likes to ask - remember the first time we danced? Remember the first time we fought? Remember the first time we planned to meet on the train?

Severine always replies the same, a punchline only they know.

“How could I forget?”


End file.
